China Southern Fund Accelerates Its Growth With Storage and Content Solutions From Hitachi Vantara

Overview

Challenge

• Create a high-performance storage solution to deal with exponential growth of unstructured data and cost.

Solution

• Storage architecture is enhanced thanks to deployment of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and flash modules.

Outcome

• 100% data availability and reliability to meet the strict requirements of the fund industry.
• 50% reduction in operational costs of flash storage.
• A fully compliant solution for unstructured data and backup data storage.

Challenge

China Southern Fund was among the first batch of fund management companies approved by the China Securities Regulatory Commission. Headquartered in Shenzhen with a registered capital of RMB 300 million, the company has branches in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Chengdu, Hefei and Hong Kong. As of the end of June 2018, the company had a portfolio of RMB 962 billion in asset management making it one of the leaders in the industry.

Faced with the pressures of business growth and the digital transformation of competitors, those in the fund trading sector are finding the management of their IT infrastructure to be increasingly demanding. As one of the largest Chinese fund management companies, China Southern Fund was seeking a data storage solution and architecture that could support its core business systems at its new office building.

High I/O performance, low latency and active-active disaster recovery are the fundamental to the company’s core trading system. Similarly, at its new building, the China Southern Fund was focused on finding a storage solution that could ensure 100% reliability and availability of data from its online-based core applications. It also needed to find a solution that was capable of satisfying the demanding requirements essential to handling a large volume of trading services simultaneously.

In addition to performance, a sharp rise in unstructured data was another issue the solution had to address: Its top priority was to manage, use and discover potential intelligence from this data effectively.

With a vast amount of storage solutions available in the market, the company also faced the challenge of identifying the right partner. Qualifications it was seeking included a good reputation, strong technical understanding, comprehensive solution offerings, and reliable services that it could work with in the long term.

Solution

To tackle these performance and business intelligence needs, China Southern Fund decided to adopt an all-flash array from Hitachi Vantara as its core storage platform for its new office. Hitachi Vantara recommended the deployment of the high-end Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) with flash modules (FMD), to provide the high stability and performance necessary to the company’s core business systems.

Compared to traditional solid-state drives (SSD), FMD provides higher IOPS (input/output operations per second) and better durability. The built-in compression chip and cache can achieve a compression ratio of 2:1, without consuming the memory resources of the storage controller. At the same time, it can maintain a write latency of as low as 0.1ms. This helps satisfy the low latency and high I/O performance requirements that are essential to the core trading system of China Southern Fund.

In addition, the solution also provides a high level of flexibility that allows the company to adapt to future business needs easily. Via the built-in software included in the Hitachi VSP F series and VSP G series, China Southern Fund can choose to deploy an additional VSP without needing to adjust its existing systems.

The implementation of Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) and Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI) also enables China Southern Fund to store a vast amount of unstructured data effectively. This software provides HTTP-based access for different business units, as well as the easy sharing of network-attached storage (NAS) files internally. Above all, the customized metadata feature also lays a solid foundation for potential big data mining, which is rapidly becoming an important aspect for the future of those operating in the financial services sector.

Outcome

As digital transformation progresses across the financial services sector, fund trading is also increasingly reliant on the internet. In fact, internet funds have already become an integral part for the China Southern Fund business. With the help of a total data storage solution by Hitachi Vantara, spanning across consultation, implementation and technical support, the company has equipped itself to meet the tough requirements of online fund trading, for both the present and the future.

The all-flash array of Hitachi Vantara is of the highest standards in the industry, providing full data usability and stability, as well as random read/write performance (in 16k blocks) of over 1 million IOPS. This has helped to guarantee the strong performance that is crucial to China Southern Fund’s internet fund business.

The FMD has a built-in compression function, offering more than two times the compression ratio in virtualization and database environments. This means a significant savings of more than 50% on flash storage space operation costs, resulting in a positive impact to the business’ bottom-line.

More importantly, proper management and storage of unstructured data is a pivotal step for China Southern Fund to discover big data intelligence and to support business growth. The object storage and content platform solutions put forward by Hitachi Vantara have helped the company address immediate and prepare for future needs: It can manage and store a large volume of unstructured data, while satisfying demands for backup and compliance as well.